Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[Grek]

Size works perfectly fine.

You add Size as automatic successes to all soak rolls and damage, but add (Attacker Size - Defender Size) to the TN to hit at all. Human scale combatants are size 0, power armour guys are size 1. So a human trying to shoot a power armoured lady needs* to get 1 success on his attack roll to connect and does no extra damage due to his size, but the power armour guy gets an automatic success on her soak roll before armour. In reverse, the power armour lady needs to roll 3 successes on her attack and does an extra damage to the human before armour, who makes a regular, no bonus soak roll to negate it.

*This is assuming base TN of 2 to hit something the same size as you in a random, facing-determined location.

[Lokathor]

TN Shifting with a Dice Pool mechanic is a bad idea because it makes the actual odds of a situation hard as fuck to calculate.

Don't do it man, don't do it.

[Grek]

TN as in "You need this many hits" not TN as in "You need this much for the die to be a hit".

[Saxony]

If it is at all similar to the size categories in DnD 3.5, where you have to add a +4 instead of a +16 because the monster is three sizes larger than you normally fight.... it's a headache to adjust for different sizes if you run into a variety.

But if there are only 3 sizes (human, superhuman, mecha/sea monster), then okay. That's not too bad. In 3.5 there are... what, 8? 10?

[Koumei]

In D&D there are:
Core: 9 (Fine, Diminutive, Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, Huge, Gargantuan, Colossal)
+Joke Book: 10 (adds Colossal+)
M&M: 11 (adds Titanic and Awesome)
Den being smartasses: unknown (adds BigLargeMcFuckenHuge etc. as whims and needs dictate)
Dicefucks: 27 (adds Macro- versions of the above and Mega- versions of the above. Yes, a Mega-Tiny creature is in fact continent-sized)

[Saxony]

I feel vaguely proud that I was close to the actual number. That and vaguely ashamed.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Heavy Gear Blitz has size as a numerical stat.
A heavy tank has Size 14: http://dp9.com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloa ... ller_0.pdf
A light tank has Size 10: http://dp9.com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloa ... rKlemm.pdf
A standard mech has size 6: http://dp9.com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloa ... Hunter.pdf
A heavy weapons mech has size 7: http://dp9.com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloa ... Kodiak.pdf
A superheavy mech that sacrifices the mobility advantages of both tanks and typical Gears for good offense and armor has size 9: http://dp9.com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloa ... ammoth.pdf

[norms29]

September 1937 - France, Britain, and Canada enter World War II.

I know I'm wicked late in asking this, but why (and in what capacity) are these countries are entering the war 2 years early?

[Grek]

Probably due to R'lyeh invading Australia and the surrounding area.

[Username17]

Yeah, the war in South East Asia expands much faster, because R'lyeh and Japan are working it from opposite ends. This brings in France (to protect Indochina) and the British Commonwealth (to protect New Zealand) two years early. I honestly doubt there's even a Munich agreement, the European Axis powers just take advantage of the colonial powers being distracted with a war in the Pacific to start taking stuff in 1938.

The US probably enters early as well, after the Manila attacks in 1940.

-Username17

[norms29]

2000: Turn of the century sees the arrival of the first Goat Spawn on Earth. After discovering that the Moon Beasts have been defeated, the Goat Spawn announce their presence to the UN and reveal the existence of Shub Niggurath.

maybe my grasp of the Mythos is weak, why does the moon beasts getting beaten cause the goat spawn to betray Shub Niggurath?

[RadiantPhoenix]

2000: Turn of the century sees the arrival of the first Goat Spawn on Earth. After discovering that the Moon Beasts have been defeated, the Goat Spawn announce their presence to the UN and reveal the existence of Shub Niggurath.

maybe my grasp of the Mythos is weak, why does the moon beasts getting beaten cause the goat spawn to betray Shub Niggurath?

Because they wanted to anyway, and now they think human civilization might be able to help.

Whether that's because their opinion of humanity's power went up, or because the moon beasts were in the way before Humans beat something big or because the moon beasts were defeated is up to whomever.

EDIT: clarification

[norms29]

2000: Turn of the century sees the arrival of the first Goat Spawn on Earth. After discovering that the Moon Beasts have been defeated, the Goat Spawn announce their presence to the UN and reveal the existence of Shub Niggurath.

maybe my grasp of the Mythos is weak, why does the moon beasts getting beaten cause the goat spawn to betray Shub Niggurath?

Because they wanted to anyway, and now they think human civilization might be able to help.

Whether that's because their opinion of humanity's power went up, or because the moon beasts were in the way before Humans beat something big or because the moon beasts were defeated is up to whomever.

EDIT: clarification

they wanted to anyway? isn't Shub Niggurath their goddess? and also kind of mother thing? seems like there'd be more loyalty there

[RadiantPhoenix]

they wanted to anyway? isn't Shub Niggurath their goddess? and also kind of mother thing? seems like there'd be more loyalty there

Likely explanation: she's not very nice (<- understatement), even to them.

[Grek]

they wanted to anyway? isn't Shub Niggurath their goddess? and also kind of mother thing? seems like there'd be more loyalty there

Shub Niggurath's got a bunch of kids who are of various loyalties:

• Ithaqua: Remember the giant red eyed monster from the ice planet of Borea from up thread? Yeah, that's one of her kids. Not loyal at this point, since he constitutes a different faction.
• Zhar, Alaozar and Lloigor: Zhar is a Great Old one who can astrally project himself. He is connected by tentacles to Lloigor, who is another Great Old One and also a race of energy beings at the same time. Alaozar is the planet they live inside, which may also be alive. Together, they're a set of triplets who are worshiped by the Tcho-Tcho. Probably more loyal than Ithaqua but less loyal than a Dark Young.
• Dark Young: Those giant meat tree monsters Frank posted pictures of? Yeah, them. They are 100% loyal to Shub Niggurath.
• gof'nn hupadgh Shub-Niggurath: These are created when humans go through a ritual where they summon a Dark Young, get swallowed by it and get spit back out as a goat person. Since the Dark Young will devour anyone who isn't 100% loyal to Shub-Niggurath and just eat them instead of transforming them, these are always 100% loyal to her as well.
• Goat Men: In the actual books, these are from the Dreamlands. But we've decided to have them be Shub Niggurath spawn because otherwise there are way way too many goat people in the setting. Basically, they're what happens if you cross a gof'nn hupadgh with a human or let two of them breed true without actually indoctrinating the resulting kids into Shub-Niggurath's cult. You get a goatman who is only tangentially loyal to Shub-Niggurath and will turn on her if you do something impressive enough.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Africa is cthonian central, at least according to Campbell Lumley. I don't recall how much that changed over the run of CoC.

Fixed that for you.

Just in case anyone wasn't sure, I'm a gigantic nerd. This correction was timely- I recorded a terrible chaphop song over the weekend and rhymed

"You can't tell me Black Aggie's not hidden at the damned Smithsonian"

with

"Getting chummy like Lumley with some G'harne cthonians"

Sigh. Sometimes I feel like someone should tell me to stop.

[hyzmarca]

Cyborgs can go to Highschool.

Particularly if it's 2097 and people know about aliens, then cyborgs can go to highschool.

Sure. But they can't go to highschool if they are adult military-grade cyborg police like RoboCop. One of the things that is desirable is to make characters who actually don't go to highschool for those crazy games where highschool isn't supposed to be a thing. Just like there are available characters who don't interact with the Police Procedural Game if you don't want to do it and characters who don't do the Giant Mecha Fighting Monsters portion of the game if you don't want to do that.

-Username17

What designates an "adult" cyborg, then? Because in the fiction, you have B-ko and C-ko and Nuku Nuku and Aigis with enough raw power to take over a small town going to high school. You also have the pure machine transfer student from Assassination Classroom trying to kill a hyper-intelligent shoggoth teacher.

Given the source material, highschool is less a power tier as it is a setting and superstructure. It's like making a fantasy heartbreaker and saying people don't want to play adventurers.

The Adult Cyborg is Major Kusanagi. She's a regular solider who just happens to have heavy cybernetic upgrades. She's you're boss if you're in the Mobile Armed Riot Police.

September 1937 - France, Britain, and Canada enter World War II.

I know I'm wicked late in asking this, but why (and in what capacity) are these countries are entering the war 2 years early?

I might have accidentally typed the wrong number, but that can't be it. No. It must be because the war in the Pacific heated up early due to R'lyeh's involvement.

On the armor issue, rather than megascale damage, AP gets a value. You You compare AP to the armor value and determine which one is greater. If the AP exceeds armor value it negates the autohits. If the AP doesn't then it doesn't. This gives more detail to fine tune what weapons pierce what armor. It does have the unfortunate side-effect of giving us more numbers to fiddle with and balance, though.

[kzt]

Size works perfectly fine.

So it's harder to shoot holes in a semi trailer than a smaller main battle tank?

[Grek]

The tank gets a larger Size despite having more volume. This is due to its increased weight and the ratio of mass or armouredness. Weird, but true.

[Hicks]

Or the trailer is size 17 with an armor score of 1 (protection 18) and the tank is size 15 with an armor score of 10 (protection of 25); the tank is also harder to hit because of its smaller size.

[norms29]

September 1937 - France, Britain, and Canada enter World War II.

I know I'm wicked late in asking this, but why (and in what capacity) are these countries are entering the war 2 years early?

I might have accidentally typed the wrong number, but that can't be it. No. It must be because the war in the Pacific heated up early due to R'lyeh's involvement.

well 1937 had been used twice, so I was sure it was intentional. admittedly having the war start early in the pacific changes the dynamic somewhat, but not necessarily for the worse.

I know it's ancient history in the time we intend for the setting, But I would love to see that fleshed out.

[hyzmarca]

Let's use the actual terms the military uses: AM (anti-materiel) for things that you shoot at stuff with high AV and AP (anti-personnel) for thing you shoot at stuff with high SV.

If we were writing this for military personnel instead of, y'know, gamers, that would make some sense, but the majority of potential players associate AP with armor piercing. I don't think it's worth fighting against the tide on this one.

Why would the Lemurians be more sympathetic? They already have, "exterminate several friendly races," as one of their primary goals.

For comparison, the Union just looks weird.

The Lemurian's fundamental claim is that the "friendly" races they want to exterminate are just another symptom of the corruption of the Union by Mythos forces, and they've got a point. Unless the non-POV setting material is explicit about the Union being right and the Lemurians being wrong, people coming into this with more Mythos than anime or transhumanist background are gonna agree with them. The "good guys" are almost never the biotech faction in Western sci-fi, and even the transhumanists tend to timeskip from AR glasses and smartphone-as-exocortex to ubiquitous implants being a fait accompli. Selling the iPod-looking pure humans as antagonists when the protagonists are fishman-loving r'lyeh-harnessing alien-consorting mutants is gonna be tough unless you make the Lemurians about as twisted as the Union from a 2013 non-transhumanist perspective.

That's exactly why the genocidal faction has to be the one that is the most like us. To do otherwise would be to perpetuate that most comforting yet terrible lie, that it can't happen here.

The thing is, Lovecraft was super-racist. The guy actually wrote a letter that essentially said "I don't agree with Hitler's methods, but it's really all the Jews' fault" in a less succinct and more verbose manner. Much of the horror of his work, especially The Shadow over Innsmouth, comes from deeply racist and culturally chauvinistic assumptions about how the world does and should work.

Cthulutech naively embraced that, and then made it worse by layering gratuitous rape and utter stupidity on top of it. I propose to reject it entirely. To Lovecraft, Barrack Obama would be true cosmic horror. The very idea of a mulato POTUS would have sent him into gibbering madness. Thus I propose to take it one step farther. Rather than merely black and mixed-race politicians holding high office, we have Deep One and hybrid politicians, Ghouls and Goat-Spawn, too. His very symbol of racial inferiority and degeneration is embraced. His symbol of cultural contamination becomes a symbol of multiculturalism.

The genocidal faction has to be us because they are precisely us. They're the worst and most superficial in us. They have a point? If you take them at face value, without examining their arguments and their rhetoric, that is true. If you naively take Hitler at face value, without examining his arguments and his rhetoric, he had a point. A fuckton of people agreed with him. At the end of the day, the Nazis were normal people who bought into a bullshit ideology precisely because it sounded reasonable on the surface and they failed to dig farther. As comforting as if might be to paint them as monsters, they were all too human. Their crimes were very human crimes, which are easily repeated by the ignorant.

Our question then becomes, it is better to be an evil human, or a good monster?

[Username17]

Cthulutech naively embraced that, and then made it worse by layering gratuitous rape and utter stupidity on top of it. I propose to reject it entirely. To Lovecraft, Barrack Obama would be true cosmic horror. The very idea of a mulato POTUS would have sent him into gibbering madness. Thus I propose to take it one step farther. Rather than merely black and mixed-race politicians holding high office, we have Deep One and hybrid politicians, Ghouls and Goat-Spawn, too. His very symbol of racial inferiority and degeneration is embraced. His symbol of cultural contamination becomes a symbol of multiculturalism.

Yeah. That's not an exaggeration or speculation. That's pretty much the "dire revelation" at the end of Medusa's Coil. The horror isn't that she's a Lamia, the horror is that she's part negro. Really.

It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside—the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist’s skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation—was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe’s most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman Sophonisba—for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.

Yes, the real "gotcha" at the end of the story is really honestly supposed to be that she has a small drop of blood from East Africa and was nonetheless accepted into high society. Dun Dun DUN! The idea of someone being fully 50% East African and being elected into the presidency would break his god damn mind.

Whenever you try to play Lovecraft's racial impurity stuff straight, it feels extremely wrong. It feels extremely wrong because it actually is amazingly wrong. Getting upset because of Goat Spawn genetic contamination is a horrible thing to do, because in the original work it is literally and specifically a stand-in for concern that people around you might interbreed with Jews, Negroes, or Chinamen. Those books are written from the perspective of the actual bad guys of the time, because HP Lovecraft was actually one of the bad guys of his day.

-Username17

[Maxus]

Yeah, Lovecraft got the absolute worst features of "Aristocratic Background". Highly elitist, racist (though his views on it didn't squick me out near as bad as Howard's Conan books. This princess of a country of black-skinned princess can be identified as high nobility because she has white skin. There is so much wrong with that on so many levels).

[kzt]

The past is a different country. Things now seen as evil and weird were accepted as good and desirable by very smart people occupying respected offices and positions, not just by somewhat crazy horror writers. The whole eugenics movement, including the goverment imposed mass sterilizations, wasn't the domain of fringe nuts, it was created and run by elected officials, well known physicians and scientists, as well as by the rich and famous. It was well supported by the various public interest foundations, like the Carnegie Institution, Kellogg, etc. Heck, in the early 1930s there was a push for euthanasia in the US.

The early (non-murderous) steps at eugenics by the Nazis were hailed by as least some of the leaders of the US eugenics movement.

Without the Nazi example as to where eugenics leads eugenics might well have continued as a major movement in the US.

However, I'm still not sure that making the "good guys" excessively bizarre is a good idea.